Tabula Rasa
by LegalBlonde
Summary: COMPLETE. Tabula Rasa -- an empty slate. Sydney, Vaughn, romance, angst.
1. Default Chapter

Title: Tabula Rasa

Author: LegalBlonde

Rating: G

Pairing: S/V

Spoilers/Timeline: None, future

Summary:  Sydney, Vaughn, angst, romance.  

Disclaimer:  JJ has lots of money.  I have none.  JJ owns lots of characters.  I own none. 

Author's Note: This was written for the SD-1 May challenge.  Flowers, baseball, a movie quote.  What movie quote?  "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."  From The Matrix, of course.  (Is it May 15 yet?)

She doesn't know exactly how it happened.  There was "my mother is my mother" and "I'm not putting my job in front of you" and "you used my razor again" and "why didn't you call" and "never question where my loyalties lie".  And then there is nothing.  She opens the door to a puff of stale air, the smell of a house sitting empty too long.  Her feet pad across the still-clean carpet and her hand trails along the kitchen counter.  She does not set down her bag until she reaches the bedroom, where the pillows are fluffed and the bed is made.  She lets the bag fall from her shoulder with a thud, denting the pristine peace of the perfectly-covered mattress.  She knows there will be a note, neat script on a lined yellow page, and a message, blinking red light on the black machine, and it won't be Joey's pizza this time.  It will be "I'm so sorry" and "I just need some time" and "it's not you, it's me" and "can we talk in person" she knows she will read it until it falls apart at the precise creases or play it until the machine starts to click and stick at the beginning, and she will have a cool glass of wine and a warm bath and she will begin the long business of forgetting.  

DC or North Texas or even Wisconsin.  She will work from another office for a while, saying she can better direct Sloane's investigation from there, citing a specialist or an artifact or a team.  She will put a bronze-colored lockbox on the door and a bored agent across the street, and she will pack up her life in a matched set of black leather luggage, taking her dark suits and her light shirts and the stick of yellow concealer that covers the circles under her eyes.  She will leave  behind photographs and letters and a thin stack of printed emails, she will take the old perfume and not the new, she will leave the new leather-bound set of poetry books behind and stuff her old paperbacks into her bags.  She will tap out her new life on a taupe-colored keyboard, sitting straight at an angular metal desk with a center drawer that sticks.  She will stack the paperwork up on either side, three stacks on the left and two on the right, and she will love searching through reams of Echelon data.  At least, she will try.  

She will learn a new language.  There's popular dialect of Farsi she's not familiar with, and she's never mastered Dutch.  She will write a paper.  One professor always told her what potential she had, said she might publish, poise her herself perfectly on the tenure track.  She can add her name to the dusty archives of bland literary journals, she can close her eyes and dream about her cluttered office and eager students and her bright future in a job she will never have.    

**********

He will go to a hockey game.  He will sit in the fourth row and have two beers, or maybe three.  He will buy a bag of peanuts and crack open the shells and let the red husks fall onto his shirt and not bother to brush them off.  She always hated that.  He will jump to his feet and cheer at the goals and the fights and when it's time for the Zamboni, he will turn his head and leave the row and wait in the long refreshments line.  

He will go to a baseball game.  He will wear a dingy Mets cap turned backward and a t-shirt with "Walk for Hope 10k 1999" across the back and he will run his hands down the worn fabric of his jeans.  He will choose a night game, so he can return home late and fall soon to sleep.  He will buy a hot dog, and he will not bring his glove, because she always wanted to do that, and always believed she would catch the home run.  

He will move to a different desk.  Work harder, arrive earlier, and stop rushing out the doors to get home.  He was a rising star once, a prospect, an up-and-comer, a company man.  He will be one again.  He will wear dark suits and white shirts and red ties.  He will speak precisely and act cautiously and keep his head bent over his desk.  He will accept the promotion, even if it means a transfer, and he will close his eyes and picture a bigger desk, in a private office, with a wood-laminate nameplate that says Michael C. Vaughn.  He will use his middle initial; it sounds more official.  He will pack away the picture frames and hang his diploma on the wall, _summa cum laude_ embossed in crimson for all to see.  

He will close his eyes when the ache starts behind his forehead, he will keep a package of aspirin and a bottle of water in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk.  And the bright colors and scents and sounds of memory will fade, leaving his world a dull, immaculate gray.  


	2. Chapter 2

*************

Penicillin.  Dynamite.  X-rays.  Post-it notes.  The greatest scientific discoveries were made by accident.  And accident, it seems, rules Sydney's life as well.  A drunken message left on a machine.  A codename overheard in a catastrophe.  A friend arriving too late.  

And an empty warehouse on a Tuesday afternoon.  The day was not remarkable and the mission not exceptional; she wore dark tactical clothes and carried a device to crack a safe.  She could perform this operation in her sleep, and often had.  She took out a guard and opened the safe and slipped the slender packet of papers inside her vest.  She crouched low as she ran along a narrow passageway, prepared to exit the heavy rear doors and run down the rusted exterior stairs and return to the pristine, soulless office where she files away her life.  

But she heard footsteps down below.  Two light thudding sounds and the scraping of metal, like the opening of a file cabinet drawer.  She looked, more out of boredom than anything else.  And her blood froze.  

She knew the quick, confident carriage and the bristling gray hair, she did not need to hear his voice.  She did not even see his face.  In one moment, every unanswered question and unfulfilled frustration and inchoate fear were forgotten, superceded by the cool, clear assurance of one who knows exactly what to do.  She straightened up, not fearing accomplices or detection, and she pulled the heavy black Beretta from her waistband.  He was unhurried, poking through files, his languor buying her time.  She held the gun steady, meticulously lining up the tiny dark prong with the narrow gap beyond, and those sights with the prickly gray head that was the substance of her revulsion.  

She drew a short, steady breath.  She squeezed the trigger.  Five times.  

*************

Leaves turn golden and crimson and blood red.  Cool air whips around the eaves of her temporary home.  She has created a routine: gym, office, jogging, cooking, books, sleep.  She rearranges the tall stacks of paper on her angular metal desk.  She accepts a shining plaque she can't display and a prestigious award no one can talk about.  He father calls every other Monday.  Her mother hasn't been seen.  Will is coming when the weather gets warm, they will rent bikes and follow obscure trails and dangle bare feet in the shallow river that runs near her house.  He will listen to her stories and make her laugh and ask when she will come back, and why she refuses to stay.  He will sleep on the wide couch under a new blanket and after five days he will go home.  They will not discuss any of the you-know-whos and will refuse to speculate about lives twisted beyond recognition and loves killed before their time.  And when he is gone she will sit alone on the wide couch, eating her dinner, and consider joining a second gym.  


	3. Chapter 3

****************

He will buy a plane ticket, he decides.  And flowers.  And he will wear the new suit that's hanging pressed in his closet.  He will buy a laminated fold-out map and find the obscure address he looked up once, the one he memorized that first day.  He will call a taxi and have the driver take him there, but will not make him wait.  He will knock three times on the front door, and if she dos not answer, he will sit on the front steps and lay the flowers down beside him and wait for her to come home.

He will deliver an eloquent speech, the one he works on at night before he slips off to dream.  He will be prepared; he will have an answer for every argument and a solution for every rebuttal.  And if she does not listen, he will sit back down on the second step and wait for her until she does.  Perhaps he will buy more flowers, or change into a different suit.  But he will wait, and she will listen.  For the first time, ever, he will have thought of everything he needs to say.  

*****************

She will call him, she decides.  She will pick up the phone and dial, as if she'd never forgotten the number, as if she doesn't look it up every other week just to be sure it hasn't changed.  He will pick up, and sound uncertain, and she will plunge right in before he has a chance to change his mind.  She will tell him about emptiness, about goals and missions and revenge, about the dark apparition that always gnaws at her heart.  She will explain how revenge kills a person, the way it eats you from the inside out, until you are nothing but a soulless zombie with dark, empty slots for eyes.  She will say she had a heart once, long ago, and she does not know where it went, or how to find it again.  She will say she remembers colors and sights and sounds and how the world used to throb and vibrate with activity before she let it slip into shapeless gray.  

She will tell him how she looked for help, how she searched for a place for all the anger to go after Sloane was dead, and found nothing.  She will tell him how the hatred slipped away slowly, like water through a porous bowl.  How when it was gone, there was nothing underneath, that perhaps the worst feeling is not anger or hatred or revenge, but feeling nothing at all.  She will bite her lip and tug her hair and her voice will crack when she says she does not know why it is or how it happened, whether the dull emptiness is a broken heart or the punishment of a person without any heart left at all.  

She will gather her voice, and her courage, and she will not let him interrupt.  She will picture his brow furrowing deep on the other side of the phone, his green eyes shutting in frustration as his hand pinches the bridge of his nose.  She will plunge forward, and go on, and explain all the things he does not need explained to him at all.  

She will tell him she has been silly, and foolish, and mistaken, and that of all the things in the world to be afraid of, the worst is just being afraid to try at all.  And she will sit back, her hands shaking, and try not to drop the phone.  She will wait while the seconds explode over her head, the pain splitting her from the inside out.  She will hear his breaths, exhaled in sighs over the phone, feeling the weight of the world that she just dropped onto his shoulders.  

She dials once, and lets it ring three times, and gets the answering machine like she always knew she would.  She takes a deep breath and blinks very fast, and hears his terse greeting over the phone.  She waits until the long beep begins and hangs up in the middle; she cannot burden him with a recorded voice in some taped mockery of an apology.  She presses the "off" button, and draws her knees up to her chest, and lets the short antenna rest against her lips as she remembers the narrow escape she just had.  She wonders if she will ever have the strength to try again.

She will go jogging, she decides.  She will pull on the loose gray pants and the tight black tank top and pound her aching feet into the ground.  She will breathe the freezing air in gasps, until her lungs ache, and she will run until her arms turn red and she can no longer feel the penetrating cold.  

********

His taxi pulls up to the curb, and it is not like he pictured it.  Smaller, with less landscaping.  But there is a narrow concrete walk that leads up to three front steps and a green-painted door.  That narrow walk is all he needs.  He draws a long breath and opens cab door, passing the driver a stack of bills with his other hand.  He waves him off, he does not need change, just the cellophane-wrapped bundle on the seat beside him, and the fortitude to wait as long as it takes.  He shuts the door and does not hear the cab pull away, just the crinkling of the cellophane in his left hand and the faint whiff of daffodils wilting in the winter sun.  

She clips the radio to her waistband and places the headphones around her neck.  ID in her pocket, keys in her hand, and she can step out the door.  She will run until she finds freedom, or run until she forgets, or run until she feels tired so she can come back tomorrow and do it all again.  She pulls open the green-painted door, prepared to step out into the cold.

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

He opens his mouth when he sees her, and cannot think of a thing to say.  It takes a moment before he puts down his fist, still poised to knock on the now-absent door.  She opens her mouth too, and shuts it again, and her gaze takes in his creased forehead and his green eyes and his dark suit and the cellophane-wrapped flowers in his hand.  He draws in a long breath, and his eyes go blank, recalling the speech he memorized, his stomach aching as he prepares to launch into the most arduous conversation of his life.

"Okay," she says.

He freezes, dumbstruck, still trying to remember the speech he prepared.  But from all the eloquent words and elegant turns of phrase, his mouth can only manage two childish syllables.  

"Okay?"

She smiles, the warm gesture spreading from her lips to the dimples in her cheeks to the tears in her soft brown eyes.  She steps forward and wraps her arms around his neck and presses her lips to his, the cellophane-wrapped flowers crinkled and crushed between them.  She remembers the scent of his shampoo and the taste of his lips and the overwhelming sense that she is, finally, home.  She pulls away and smiles at the still-shocked expression on his face, so close to her own.  She leans in closer, so he can hear, and she whispers it again.

"Okay."


End file.
